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Lafiel on 31 January 2013
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Aielyn said:
Lafiel said:
I only mentioned the WiiU CPU, because it's the odd one out. It's a custom design, but if reports are to be believed it's an old one - a GC/Wii based architecture with higher clock and additional cores, which would explain nicely why the WiiU plays Wii games.

I might give too much credit to the leaks we had the last days, but I think they look very possible. The Jaguar core CPUs in MSony's new consoles is straight off-the-shelf HW (well, not released yet), while the GPUs seem to have a little bit different configurations than standard GPUs, but base on GCN or GCN2 architecture, and WiiU's GPU is very likely to be based on the 5D-VLIV architecture, so that's all standard computer hardware with some slight customizations.

On the other hands the Cell in PS3, that was a total custom design, and so are the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer in the PS2 for example.

As I said, the problem is that we haven't seen the other ones, and the leaks don't list all of the information about the new chips.

Cell was a CPU, not a GPU, as was Emotion Engine. We're talking GPU, since we're looking at nVidia. Cell also wasn't custom design, it was very much Sony's standard CPU design of the time.

Xenos, in the 360, was a custom GPU that was very similar to an ATI Radeon X1800 series... but it wasn't quite the same, despite having similar features and performance. There's no reason to assume that the next MS console's GPU will be any less custom. Same with the PS4's GPU.

The Xenos deviated a lot from the R520 architecture in that it used unified shaders, while the R520 still was using dedicated pixel and vertex shaders -  so that's a big differentiation. I don't see why any of the new consoles GPUs would feature a similarly big distinction from the core architecture they are based on, at most it will be configurations (clock/active CUs/ROPs/..).

Nvidia isn't only producing GPUs though, with the Tegra they have ARM SoCs in their line-up aswell, and limiting the talk to GPUs seems unnecessary to me anyway as CPUs are likely to show the same shift from fully custom designed chips to using existing tech in consoles aswell. After all this topic really is about console manufacturers using PC-esque hw instead of developing something totally new, right?